For years, Lebanese media and the country’s army have reported lurid details about Israeli spy rings inside the country which assist in reconnaissance and espionage targeting Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah.

Former IDF special forces officer and novelist, Natan Odenheimer

The Israeli Defense Forces intelligence apparatus uses sophisticated listening devices planted in southern Lebanon — just one of the many surveillance tools at Israel’s disposal — to eavesdrop on the Lebanese militant group’s communications and track troop movements, among other things.

Rumors have trickled back from the front to Israeli reporters that the forays into Lebanon by the IDF’s elite commando units, Sayeret Matkal and Maglan, weren’t always clean operations. In fact, Israeli forces have encountered Lebanese civilians while planting their equipment more than once. Like Bob Kerrey and John Kerry during their days as commandos in Vietnam, when this happens, there’s only one option: eradicate the threat.

That means killing anyone, even a civilian, who detects your presence. Not just because exposure would mean certain death or capture for the team, but because it would cause a major political scandal that could embarrass the state.

‘Strange Incident’: The IDF conceals civilian murder

There is a name for these tragic encounters in Hebrew military jargon: mikreh muzar (“strange incident”). It occurred to an Israeli who I consulted about this report that this might be a veiled reference to Mark Haddon’s 2003 mystery novel, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” the plot of which harkens back to the famous Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that, mysteriously, didn’t bark.

Front cover of Natan Odenheimer’s Hebrew novel, Nifla Po.

The IDF doesn’t want the world to know that it kills innocent civilians in cold blood. But a new novel written by Natan Odenheimer, who once served with the Maglan special forces unit, sheds new light on this military procedure.

The novel’s Hebrew title, “Nifla Po,” can be translated as “Wonderful Here” — a reference to a popular song of the same name by HaBiluim (the group’s name is a double entendre which can mean “Good Time Boys” or “Pioneers,” a reference to the early Jewish settlers of Palestine). The song itself is a scabrous satire of the norms and prejudices of Israeli society:

“The Arabs of Kfar Shmaryahu [those who lived in this wealthy suburb were expelled during the Nakba] are no longer Arabs

The cat meows and so do the dogs

The Arabs of Kfar Shmaryahu are good Arabs

The Arabs of Herzliya [another wealthy suburb whose Arab residents have long since been expelled] are no longer angry

The donkeys bray and so do the horses

The Arabs of Herzliya are Russians [the latest wave of underclass immigrants]

It’s wonderful here, simply wonderful

Come, the sun rises each morning

It’s wonderful here, simply wonderful

Come, come quickly [a reference to the Zionist call for aliyah]

In the stock market they say everyone’s making money

Everyone’s happy, everyone’s blessed

All of us, all are brothers

The women are beautiful, the food is tasty

The Dead Sea is full of marvelous fish [no animals survive in the heavily saline water]

And the [IDF] captives in Lebanon are still alive [they died at the outset of the 2006 Lebanon war]”

Odenheimer’s novel recounts the battlefield experiences of a hero who served in a unit similar to the one in which the author himself served. In some sense, the novel format enables the author to provide a more truthful account than if he were writing a piece of nonfiction, because the IDF censor would require him to heavily censor a book claiming to be fully factual. For a novel, however, the censor can afford to be more flexible.

In Odenheimer’s book, the narrator says there are two possibilities when an Arab civilian disrupts an IDF commando patrol on foreign soil: the operation can be aborted or the civilian can be murdered. If the operation is not of the highest priority, it might be cancelled. If it is a high-priority mission, though, that leaves only one option.

Of course, the army can’t just shoot the intruder and leave his body on the hillside — that would expose the fact that an Israeli patrol had intruded on foreign ground, constituting a major incident with ensuing fallout. So, seeking to conceal not only its presence, but its bloody deeds, the civilian’s death is made to look like an accident. They decide to take him to the top of a cliff and throw him off, preferably into a ravine. Again, though, exposure is a danger, so great pains must be taken to ensure the victim’s cries aren’t heard. That is why the killing must take place in a remote area where no one can hear.

Of course, there’s an easy way to end these cold-blooded murders: stop trespassing on Lebanese and Syrianterritory. After all, in this day and age, the most sophisticated nations don’t need surveillance devices to be planted physically on enemy soil. (While it’s been reported for years that élite Israeli troops encroach on Lebanese sovereignty, it’s been far less known that this also happens in Syria, and so Odenheimer’s book is a bit of a revelation, despite its place on the fiction shelf.)

Amos Harel, writing for Haaretz on Tuesday, reported on the end of the practice, but portrayed it murkily, perhaps even fraudulently:

“The order calls for soldiers to thwart captivity even at the expense of a fellow trooper’s life.

… The procedure requires soldiers to try and [sic] thwart being captured even if doing so – for instance, by shooting at the abductors – might endanger the captured soldier’s life.

Though the procedure doesn’t permit soldiers to intentionally kill a kidnapped comrade, many officers and soldiers in the field have interpreted it in this way.”

Other Haaretz reporters have alluded to the explicit meaning of Hannibal and what it entails. But even those who are more explicit have portrayed it in veiled terms that force the audience to read between the lines and infer that it involves deliberate murder.

But my own independent Israeli sources have confirmed the true meaning of the directive and numerous instances in which it was invoked, resulting in the deaths of soldiers at the hands of their comrades. Several Israeli journalists and I have published exposes of Hannibal and railed against the immorality it entails. Now, finally, it appears someone has been listening.

Eisenkot is likely dumping Hannibal as a precursor to an anticipated report by that state controller on the IDF’s conduct in Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. In the report, a draft of which has been publicly released, the controller recommends abandoning Hannibal because of the likelihood that it contravenes international law. (Here, the controller is referring to the massive firepower the IDF brings to bear in attacking territory where a captured soldier has been taken by the enemy.)

Yet this official analysis doesn’t even deal with the essential depravity of Israeli troops killing their own in order to avoid the future prospect that Israel may have to trade Palestinian prisoners to get the soldier or his body returned.

Israel’s neutrality in Syrian conflict disputed

Returning to Syria, knowledge that the IDF violates Syrian territorial sovereignty in the fashion described in Odenheimer’s novel is yet another bullet point in the list of reasons why Israel is certainly not neutral in the Syrian civil war.

Unlike Iran and Hezbollah, which have been invited by the Assad regime onto Syrian soil, no one invited Israel. The truth is that Israel doesn’t respect the borders of any of its Arab neighbors.

In some ways, the information published in Odenheimer’s book is not only shocking, but unprecedented. In a phone interview, the author told me his publisher had submitted the manuscript to the military censor for review. It had censored only one portion of the book which dealt with IDF snipers.

Astonishingly, though, the Israeli organ had no problems with the portion of the book that blows open the cover on Israel’s deadly machinations on its neighbors’ territory.

Your link to the BtS testimony points at a clear and cut procedure – capture the individual, tie hands and blindfold; if he refuses to walk with the soldiers, tie him to a stretcher. If the target house is to be occupied for a time, put him in the upper floor, and when the force is evacuating, take them with and arrest them for investigation. This is Breaking The Silence, not really known for their softening of words when the IDF is concerned.

Since “Bravo Two Zero” the issue of patrols compromised by civilians has come up time and again in Hollywood and others’ imaginations.

So now I appeal to your own imagination: a force is in the field, trying to move undetected and with a precise timetable to meet. Do you think they’ll take their time to fabricate someone’s death (and for the life of me I can ‘t imagine how you solve the problem of throwing someone from a cliff while maintaining their silence while maintaining it “clean” – do they ask nicely “please don’t scream on the way down” ?), or do you think they’ll wait for the opportunity to arise when the compromise is less than certain and only then move again, adapting the mission to the time penalty?

I don’t know about you, but I prefer not to take my facts out of fictional depictions, be the authors whomever they be.

@ OneIsraeli: No, it doesn’t. As I wrote in the article, this is a censored, bowdlerized version of the procedure. As Odeneheimer writes, there are two options: one you kill the intruder; two, you cancel the operation. When you cancel the operation you still have to detain the intruder & that is likely what the BtS testimony is describing. Please stop hasbarizing. It’s unseemly & unpersuasive. An Israeli commando force is invading a foreign country with no right to do so. Why? Why does Israel have the right no other country except the U.S., Saudi Arabia, China & Russia have? Why does it have the right to ignore foreign borders? And why does it expect any other country or people to respect Israel’s? Actually, Israel refuses to declare any borders. But that’s another problem. If you are going to kill someone, you bind his hands & mouth so he can’t scream. You are far enough away from towns that whatever noise he makes can’t be heard. Even if you don’t stuff his mouth and he does scream it’s likely too far away from the village to be heard. And even if it was, the patrol will be gone by the time an alarm is raised. Why are you acting like such a dunderhead? Were you born this way or did Hasbara Central teach you to be this way? It is not a “fictional” depiction. It is labeled as fiction because the censor would go lighter on it. It is factual. If you treat it as fiction, you won’t do it here. Unless of course you can prove this description is false. Then of course you may offer real & credible evidence it is. Till then, take your hasbara & shove it.

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2 years ago

Shlomi

So now BtS are censored but a novel is reality? And that is called ‘Journalism’?

Can you give a name of anyone who may have been killed this way? So far you have a ridiculous ‘proof’ of what the procedures are but lack of victims makes this article a ludicrous fantastical conspiracy.

@Shloni: of course BtS is censored. Who offers the testimonies? Do you know their names? No.

But it’s entirely possible, as I noted, that the testimony is not censored & the soldier described the part of mikreh muzar that involved arresting, but not killing the intruder.

You apparently are not a student of literature. There are as many types of novels as there are novels. There are novels which are entirely fiction. There are romans a clef which is thinly disguised fiction in which fictional characters stand in for real people. This novel used a fictional veneer which permitted the author to avoid censorship.

Actually, I’m certain IDF commandos actually register the names,addresses & phone numbers of those they murder. They do this so they may send flowers to the family of the deceased because, well, they’re just that kind of army. Seriously. You can find Odenheimer as easily as I did. If you have questions why don’t you ask him instead of wasting our time here.

You are now done in this thread. Do not publish again here.

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2 years ago

OneIsraeli

There are a couple of logical problems in your reply. First, as Shlomi points out – since when BtS censors itself, and what in their page leads you to think they did this time? There are no such mentions. Second, “When you cancel the operation you still have to detain the intruder” – no, you don’t. Unless the intruder actually identifies the force, as long as it is just “a boy sitting in a rock watching the moon” a cancelled operation will either turn back and move or wait for the intruder to go away, then move. Third, “Please stop hasbarizing. It’s unseemly & unpersuasive”, I know you have an aversion to people speaking out of their own personal experience, but let’s just say that not everyone that disagrees with your fine points is engaging in hasbara – it might just happen you misunderstood something you have less experience with, no? Btw, on the subject of “unpersuasive”, putting your fingers in your ears and singing la-la-la is hardly a valid dialectic device. Fourth: “If you are going to kill someone, you bind his hands & mouth so he can’t scream” – so, to my question, how do you throw someone bound and gagged from a cliff and then make it look like an accident? Fifth: “You are far enough away from towns that whatever noise he makes can’t be heard” – how do you decide that? Isn’t it more likely that encounters will happen more frequently closer to population centers than out in the wild? And if the encounter happens so far away from a population center, why go through the bother of fabricating a scenario when you can just as easily knife someone and drop the body into a crevice? Your counter-argument doesn’t hold water. Sixth: “Why are you… Read more »

@ OneIsraeli: Second, “When you cancel the operation you still have to detain the intruder” – no, you don’t. Unless the intruder actually identifies the force, as long as it is just “a boy sitting in a rock watching the moon” a cancelled operation will either turn back and move or wait for the intruder to go away, then move. This is simply not how commmando operations work in enemy territory. Whenever anyone discovers their presence that person must be either eliminated or neutralized so that he poses no threat. Clearly, Odenheimer is talking about an intruder who identifies the force. Otherwise, why would you have to do anything to the intruder? how do you throw someone bound and gagged from a cliff and then make it look like an accident? I noted in my comment that if the commando force is far enough from any village you don’t have to bind & gag the victim. You could throw him from the cliff & any noise he makes doesn’t jeopardize the force. I’m also sure a commando force can bring with it a drug that might neutralize an intruder so that he may be eliminated quietly. Finally, even if you bound & gagged a victim all you’d need to do is send a soldier to the site where the victim landed & remove the binding. you can just as easily knife someone and drop the body into a crevice? The whole point of mikreh muzar is to make it appear the victim died naturally of an accident. Stabbling the victim to death is murder & also allows any pathologist to determine the cause of death. That arouses suspicion that it was an IDF commando squad, just the exposure the IDF is trying to avoid. if this is the only thing… Read more »

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2 years ago

Trapper Jon

Jews throws a Christian child down a well, and Israelis throws an innocent Lebanese down a cliff.
Got it!

It is troubling to see the loads of out right antisemitic comments on your MintPress article. I saw you condemned one picture but what about the rest?

Looking at older articles of yours, it invited much of the same and by the same commentators.

Isn’t there anything you can do?

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2 years ago

Deïr Yassin

@ Shlomi
You’re right. I commented once or twice on Richard’s articles on Mint Press, but I realized that the comment section is occupied by a Zionist troll (KilkulOlam) whose sole purpose is to shit on Richard and some genuine antisemitic trolls so I never returned there. Because of your comment here I went back, and left a comment to some Helen4Yemen (who’s clearly an antisemite and takes great effort to misrepresent Richard’s points of view in her comments). My comment is awaiting moderation it says, that’s incredible, because it apparently means that the clearly antisemitic posts and photoshops have been approved by a moderator.
Richard is not responsible for monitoring the comment section there, but I think the staff at Mint Press should be adressed on this, personally I will try to contact them. As I wrote in my comment there: the Palestinian cause do not need that kind of disgusting trolls who probably don’t even care about Palestinians.

@ Deir Yassin: the editors know my views on this subject. I told them I ‘d prefer comments either be closed for my articles or closely monitored. But I don’t control editorial policy there.

I suggest you both write to the editor & register yr views.

Personally, I am certain there are deranged Zio trolls out there who have nothing better to do than create fictitious anti Semitic sock puppets to make the progressive cause look rancid & racist. David Lange and others of this ilk have been known to do this. I wouldn’t bev as the all surprised if that’s happening in this case. It would enable people like Shlomo to come forward and blame me for being associated with &/or agreeing with them, which I don’t.

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2 years ago

Deïr Yassin

Yes, I know there’s hasbara trolls out there posing as antisemites, I wrote that to Helen4Yemen in a comment that’s still awaiting moderation. No wonder more and more media close down the comment sections.
In this case there are three commenters: a guy with Che Guevara as avatar (a genuine antisemite, and the only one who has his profile on discus public, he seems to be a retired American of British origin), Helen4Yemen that’s I come across on Middle East Eye (the profile is private) and some TecumsehUnfaced (private profile).

I’ve never seen anything like this in any comment section anywhere (it’s even worse than Ynetnews and Times of Israel which at least don’t publish photoshops), and I simply don’t understand how these genuine disgusting antisemitic photoshops get through the moderation, while my two comments are still awaiting moderation.

@Sholimi: Actually, all those anti-Semitic comments were written by me under a pseudonym because, well that’s just the kind of Jew I am. And those I didn’t write myself I thoroughly approved of.

Are you daft? You think I’m responsible for the nutcases who post comments there? In what universe are you living? Do Haaretz or Jerusalem Post’s editors agree with the racist swill published by Israeli Jews in their comment threads? BTW, pls show me the complaints you’ve filed with Yediot or Maariv about the violent hateful comments posted there by your brethren. If you haven’t then do so befire you shoe us what a hypocrite you are.

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2 years ago

Shlomi

Richard – nobody said you wrote those comments or bare full responsibility for them but don’t pretend to not see the difference between those comments to what one may read on ynet or haaretz. Especially when it comes to the quantity and the sort of language used.

There are 15 comments by ‘tapatio’, 36 by ‘TecumsehUnface’, and 34 by Helen4Yemen. Total 85 out of 132 or about 2/3. And past articles by you got similar treatment from those 3.

If MintPress doesn’t address your concern, why do you keep on publishing there? Your twitter feed “surrounds hate & forces it to surrender” but your article are used as a vessel to spread hate. You can’t have it both ways.

@The comment section of any Israeli newspaper online is just as bad, except diametrically opposite ideologically. If you don’t know that you either don’t read them or agree with them.

Why do I care what comments are published at Mint Press? Only in your fevered mind is this a reflection on me. If I object to your comments here should I stop publishing here as well? Your question is absurd.

Not to mention, that I invite you to find another venue for my work which has a comment section which meets your specifications. I’ll gladly publish there as long as it’s not Arutz Sheva or the like.

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2 years ago

Shlomi

[comment deleted: your next comment personally insulting me and lying about my actions and motives will lead to your moderation.]

@ Shiko: It’s actually not at all funny tf we think Usrael gas killed 40,000 Palestinians, Lebanese, etc since 1948, many of them innocent civilians. I’d focus on those rather than civilians killed in other lands.

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2 years ago

George Haabas

Mr Silverstein:
1. A novel is a novel; It is fiction; nothing more, nothing less. The trait of a good author is being able to make fiction sound like fact. It seems that Mr. Odenheimer has done a good job, at least where you are concerned. Please do not feed us his story line as a true story. Because it is not. His background has no bearing on a fictional novel.
2. I find it strange how you can sit comfortably in your USA home, being so critical of people defending themselves from enemies trying to destroy them. I would be most happy to view your comments on Hamas and Hizbullah, and attempts to prevent their further attacks on Israel, following your three years of residency in Kiryat Shemona, or Sderot.
What do you say?

@ George Habas: That is absolutely false. I interviewed Odenheimer. I spoke with him about this incident and it clearly is factual. I will no longer entertain any commenters who regurgitate the same stupid argument that because the incident is recounted in a novel it can’t be factual. This is an absolutely stupid, coarse analysis of novels & literature.

So because Catch 22 was a novel does that mean that nothing described in it actually happened to Joseph Heller, the U.S. serviceman who wrote the novel based on his personal wartime experiences? Because Mark Twain wrote novels that means that none of the experiences he describes in them on the Mississippi River, where he worked as a riverboat captain, could be actual experiences he really had? There are literally thousands if not tens of thousands of novels in which novelists recount real experiences that happened to them & do so precisely and accurately as they actually happened. NOvelists choose to tell their stories as they do for myriad reasons. But those novelists who recount their own personal experiences may not be disbelieved simply because it’s written in novel form.

Stop asking me to comment on things I’ve commented on many times before. Use Google and find what you claim you’re looking for.

Again, if you wish to prove Odenheimer’s description of mikreh muzar as false, do so with credible evidence. If you don’t, then stop nattering.

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2 years ago

George Haabas

Mr. Silverstein:

Your incredible anger prevented you from replying to the second question I asked:

2. I find it strange how you can sit comfortably in your USA home, being so critical of people defending themselves from enemies trying to destroy them. I would be most happy to view your comments on Hamas and Hizbullah, and attempts to prevent their further attacks on Israel, following your three years of residency in Kiryat Shemona, or Sderot.

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2 years ago

Deïr Yassin

Maybe he didn’t answer because hundreds of hasbara trolls (internal joke here: a new plane – or maybe drone would be better – arriving from Ben Gourion) have written exactly the same thing before you.

@George Habash: I did respond to your question. I told you to use Google to find the many examples of statements I’ve made on these subjects. Read my comments carefully & do not make me repeat myself due to your own sloppiness or laziness.

@george Habash: I’ll spend 3 yrs living in Sderot after you spend 3 yrs living under the guns in Gaza. I’ll even start a Kickstarter campaign to fund your sojourn.

The only problem is you’ll be dead after your stay there & I’ll be quite alive. So it won’t be a fair comparison.

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2 years ago

Shlomi

@Richard – “I interviewed Odenheimer” – That is new information you haven’t revealed before. Did you by mistake exposed a source?

If you present the information as one that came from him in an interview, it may be credible, though it is unclear why won’t he send it to BtS as well. The way presented in the article “oh, I read a great book with great description about IDF soldiers killing civilians” – is that credible? Please don’t make me laugh.

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2 years ago

Moshe

So let me see if i understand this corrctly.. Anybody who disagrees with richard is a hasbarah troll sponsored by the israeli goverment? And anybody who disagrees with richard gets banned?

Makes you wonder why comments are even allowed. I think richard just wants the comments of people who take his worldview about the evil israelis

I don’t agree with the Palestinian viewpoint, but at least I don’t see as many self hating Palestinians , as i do self hating jews.

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2 years ago

David

If by “self-hating” you mean “opposed to Zionism, Israel, and its crimes”, then I know lots of “self-hating Jews” and I am proud to number myself among them. Nearly half of the Jews I have known in my life are opposed to Zionism and Israel. Some of them are actively opposed; others are sensitive enough to be wary of anything “Zionist.” Slowly, the truth about Zionism, about Israel and its archaic ideologies, e.g. racism and supremacy, is getting through to the Jewish American community and I expect there will be a sizable minority in open rebellion against the many Jewish organizations which have only adopted Zionism in order to extend their bureaucratic lives and raise money. Jewish Voice for Peace and J Street are just scratching the surface of American Jewish discontent with Zionism and its absurd lies.

The days of Jewish consensus regarding Israel are long past and the debate is opening up (witness the efforts to contain it!) Once open, there will be increasing numbers of “self-hating” Jews jumping the Zionist flagship. Open debate is the ruin of Zionism in the US and Europe. That’ll leave a prickly and hostile, over-armed, racist state in the ME which virtually nobody likes or cares about except a handful of billionaires who can have the fun of “running a country.” and a bunch of armed settlers, beholden to them, sitting around their swimming pools in the midst of hundreds of millions of pissed off Arabs. Sounds a lot like White South Africa, doesn’t it?

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2 years ago

George Haabas

Interesting that you call yourself David. After all, Israel’s Zionist leader and hero is David ben Gurion, who led the fight for Israeli independence.
But seriously, your attitude, and admitance of Jewish/Israel self-hatred, with your despise for the State of Israel only proves that you have yet to learn the lessons of history. You are, unfortunately, leading yourself down a dead-end road of no return. I sincerely hope and pray that you realize your grave errors before it is too late.
This may sound rather strange, but so too did the warnings given to Jews in Europe to leave their homes as fast as possible in the 1930s and early 1940s. Most of them didn’t. And the price was more than anyone could have possibly imagined.

@ George Habash: David didn’t admit to what you claim. He said that if your definition of self hate was supporting the evils (he perceived) of Zionism, then you could call him that. But of course there is no legitimate definition of Jewish identity which is confined to such terms. So his alleged “admission” of self-hate was a rhetorical device which you seem to construe as an admission of criminal intent. It’s not. But it does confirm your own obsession with the subject and finding bad Jews under every bed & self-hate in the hearts of such bad Jews. This trope bores the shit out of me. So I warn you that if you continue down this road you will not be long for this blog’s world.

The only “dead end road of no return” is Likudist ultra-nationalism and Jewish supremacism which you and your pals walk every day. The sad part is you don’t know the price you & Israel will pay for your racism & myopia.

@ Elisabeth: I named him that as a joke. Do you think he was deliberately spoofing Habash’s name??

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2 years ago

Elisabeth

Absolutely! (And it’s probably Barbar again… Yawn.)

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2 years ago

Shlomi

David – though I deeply in disagreement with you, I at least appreciate coming out and saying your opinion out loud. I hate it when people hide behind ambiguity. I disagree with the way you dissect history, and even more so, with your conclusions but at least then you stand up and say your opinion out loud.

Richard simply takes term he dislike, empty them from any of the original meaning, then load them up with as much liberal values as his pen allow him and put the word progressive in the front.
Believing that any human being has an equal right to sovereignty in ‘Zion’ (some even more than Jews) has nothing to do with Zionism, unless you are hiking in Utah of course.
And ‘supporter of ISrael’??? Can you please explain that sentence? I know that חוסך שבטו שונא בנו, but I’m pretty sure even the rabbis gave a good word when it was deserved. Can’t remember one instance when Richard just gave praise for the smallest thing, without pooping all over it right after. So much for support!

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2 years ago

Arie Brand

@George Haabas wrote: “Interesting that you call yourself David. After all, Israel’s Zionist leader and hero is David ben Gurion, who led the fight for Israeli independence. But seriously, your attitude, and admitance of Jewish/Israel self-hatred, with your despise for the State of Israel only proves that you have yet to learn the lessons of history” Ben Gurion was, in fact, against the occupation because he had a somewhat keener sense of history than you display here. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, then a former President of the American Jewish Congress and a Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, recalled more than twenty five years ago, in the columns of the New York Review of Books, how he heard the Old Man speak immediately after the victory of 1967 when even the doves among the literati had turned into hawks: “Less than a month after the Six Day War, at the beginning of July 1967, I heard David Ben-Gurion speak at Beit Berl, the “think tank” of the Israeli Labor party… … The Ben-Gurion who walked into the meeting had about him the air of a prophet who had walked out of his tent to die, but had paused on this last journey to tell us truths which the less farsighted could not see and which only a man possessed by the spirit would dare tell. He warned his listeners against the euphoria that had swept the Jewish world in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Ben-Gurion insisted that all of the territories that had been captured had to be given back, very quickly, for holding on to them would distort, and might ultimately destroy, the Jewish state. … Now, twenty years after the heroics of June 1967, Ben-Gurion’s speech at Beit Berl, his wrathful cry that the most glorious… Read more »

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2 years ago

Shlomi

So after all the huff and puff let’s have some actual journalism here.

Can or can’t you come up with names of those alleged victims? Cases where there was a suspicion?

@ Shlomi: No Shloime, not the way it works. I have a Maglan IDF veteran who participated in mikreh muzar, witnessed incidents in which foreign civilians were murdered & wrote about it. That’s a perfectly credible source. You have nothing. So I challenge you to disprove his claims. If you can’t, shut up.

If you publish another comment in this thread which doesn’t offer such credible direct evidence that Odenheimer is wrong, I will moderate you.

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2 years ago

OneIsraeli

[comment deleted: you’re regurgitating arguments already offered here by others who I told not to post in this thread again. You are skating right on the edge of moderation.]

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2 years ago

Shlomi

Just one question where you haven’t been clear, have you interviewed Odenheimer or not? Before you wrote you did, now you say you read his book. Which one is it?

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2 years ago

Some1WhoWasThere

Sorry to interrupt the hot debate, but can someone please explain to me how Kfar Shmaryahu was built on the ruins of the Nakba, or to be more accurate: ““The Arabs of Kfar Shmaryahu [those who lived in this wealthy suburb were expelled during the Nakba]…” ?
Because as far as I know (and please correct me if I am wrong) Kfar Shmaryahu was established in 1937, on lands that were bought from the locals (Arabs).
Now, I am aware of the claims that some lands which belonged to the Arab village of “Al Haram” were confiscated and given to Kfar Shmaryahu, but if you look at the map, you can clearly see that the center of that village – the Sidne Ali mosque – is few kilometers away from Kfar Shmaryahu, and the size of the village (according to Arab testimony) was less than 1,100 acres, so the numbers doesn’t add to anything logical.
Last (but not least) there were Arabs in Al Haram that decided to leave the place in 1948, but not on Kfar Shmaryahu’s land.
And why should we care if it is Kfar Shmaryahu or Herzliya? after all an occupation is an occupation, right? Well, yes, but facts should be facts, and I think that debates should be based on facts and not on rumors.

@ some1whowaswhere? First, I have no idea where your alleged historical claims come from. Second, read the post I wrote about Amitai Etzioni, Kfar Shmaryahu & Sidne Ali (aka Sidney Alley!). If your comment was on this post then publish your comment there. Third, I assure you based on the research in that post that the Palestinian villagers were violently expelled from the entire area by Lehi, who summarily executed several villagers for allegedly betraying then to the British. Fifth, I have no stomach for historical niggling over which Palestinians were expelled, which weren’t, which were invited politely to leave etc. If that’s your thing, don’t bother.

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